Scripture:
Isaiah 29:17-24
Matthew 9: 27-31
Reflection:
Perhaps you, like me, sense that we celebrate Christmas doing the opposite of what brings peace and joy. Christmas entertainments, shopping, decorating, traveling, cooking, and trying to meet what my Mother called “social obligations,” easily fill our days and nights during this Advent season.
All this hub-bub blinds us to the message of the season. We struggle to find time alone in silence, to slow down to enjoy small details of life around us. To listen to God.
When Pope Francis addressed the U.S. Congress in the fall of 2015, he highlighted three Americans for us to study: Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day.
Each of these 20th-century pilgrims took time to prayerfully and critically analyze what is right and what is wrong with our way of life in America. They each acted on what they noticed. In their time they were condemned as disrupters, Communists, and worse. One was murdered.
Studying their lives, I have learned they each saw (their eyes were open) how the Gospel applies to a nation that prides itself on military strength, higher profits, efficiency, material comforts, possessions, self-sufficiency, while ignoring and devaluing the weak and marginalized.
These American values run counter to Jesus’ message of humility, sharing, serving, listening, non-violence, poverty, respecting God’s time, sacrifice, and total trust in God.
In today’s reading from Isaiah we are told the deaf, blind, lowly, and poor will be healed and exalted. I like to imagine Christ reading these words in the scrolls in the local synagogue. I think of him sitting alone in that sacred place, next to a window, sunlight streaming in, listening to birds and people on the streets of the sleepy town of Nazareth. There he lets the words penetrate. Over time . . . many years, in fact . . . he understands what his Father is calling him to do. His eyes are open. At the right moment he stands up in that same synagogue and quotes Isaiah to his family and fellow Nazarenes: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me with the commission to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to send off the oppressed with liberty.”
Not long afterward, in today’s Gospel, a couple of guys shouted at him on the road, asking him to pity them. Jesus immediately gave them sight. They were so thrilled that they defied his request to not speak of the miracle. Instead they whooped it up, letting everyone know what had just happened.
But more astounding was the passage that follows (verses 32-34), not included in today’s Gospel. The sighted men could see another who needed healing. They saw a mute man possessed by a demon and brought him to Jesus. What did Jesus do? He healed him, of course.
Marinating in a culture that blinds us to pain and threats everywhere, we need Christ’s healing. Making space to deeply reflect on the challenges of our time, the way that King, Merton, and Day did, will open our eyes to the urgent need to protect of our environment, ban all nuclear weapons, condemn of racism, welcome (not demonize) refugees and immigrants, curb the greed of corporate titans, insist everyone has a home, healthcare, a living wage, and an excellent education. It will also open our eyes to people right around us who are lonely, scared, hurt, sick, addicted, cold, and hungry.
We can so easily be blinded by honors, riches, power, comforts, commercial distractions, and “social obligations” of this season. Let us each ask Christ, as the two blind men pleaded, “Son of David, have pity on us!” and really believe, as they did, that He can open our eyes.
None of us can fix all that ails this world. But God is calling each of us to some noble act, however small or large, that “helps make the world a place where it is easier for people to be good” (Dorothy Day’s words).
What do you see that needs your attention this day?
“And their eyes were open.”
Jim Wayne is a board member of the Passionist Solidarity Network (PSN), and author of The Unfinished Man. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.